In an old joke, Móricko boasts that the best food is bread and butter. He didn’t eat it himself, but his brother saw it in a color photo. When we laugh at it, it’s only because food is a practical matter for every family, and not just a pious theory.

It can tire us. Theories about politics, hockey, and religion. People today are sensitive to whether we have actually experienced what we testify about. John Damascénsky expressed it succinctly when he talks about the taste of honey. People will immediately recognize whether we ate it or just saw it in a photo.

Apostle John, the author of today’s Gospel, claims to taste God’s honey. He aptly expresses this with the conjunction “what our hands have touched, we proclaim.” This is his style, because he experienced such love in the community of the apostles and under the cross of his Teacher.

Knowing God is not a theoretical question, it cannot be realized at an academic desk. Access to God is not the fruit of human effort. Access to the Light is not a matter of a person’s skill, intelligence, or will. Nor is it the fruit of ascetic practice.

That is why already in the Old Testament we find specific natural phenomena behind which God’s revelation is hidden. When we open the First Book of Kings, we find in it a cycle about the prophet Elijah. When God appears there, the four elements follow in succession: wind, earthquake, fire and light breeze. Only in the last one does Elijah meet God’s majesty.

How to humanly explain it? We must humbly admit that we are getting a little lost in it. Once God appears in the burning bush and is absent in the fire during the theophany with Elijah. When the Decalogue was handed over to Moses on stone tablets, the whole earth trembled – and here God is not in the earthquake. Nor is it in the wind, although the wind will one day resemble the activity of the Spirit. So how is it?

God likes to reveal himself through natural phenomena, but he himself is above them. That’s why he uses them at times and bypasses them at other times. And it hides, surprisingly, behind a gentle breeze. A perceptive reader of the Bible will remember the scene from the book of Genesis, when Adam walks with the Creator in the presence of a gentle wind. This is a contradiction that wants to name the unnameable. The chosen people would know how to talk about it. During his journey to the Holy Land, God appears to him sometimes in a cloud, sometimes in light.

This play of God continues in the Gospel of John. The first words that John the Baptist says about Jesus are not a theoretical treatise, distant from life. John tells us about Jesus that he is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.

With the image of the lamb, John addresses every Hebrew who knows this animal intimately. It is known from the annual Passover ceremony in the Jewish family and also from the daily sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple, offered for one’s own sins. Thus, knowledge of God is bound up with experience. Personal and community-related.

When we are already used to the image of the lamb, which will accompany us until the last pages of the Holy Scriptures, Jesus surprises us when he turns into a shepherd. The Lamb who becomes the Good Shepherd. Both are united by the fact that they like to give their lives for others.

This is the key to our decision making. Let’s look at a young person who falls in love. It’s good if he gets to know not only his beloved, but his whole family. A person who has tasted the honey of God’s love has an advantage. Just like one girl who, after visiting her future in-laws, finds that the people in this family argue and do not respect her. She noticed it very quickly because she hadn’t seen this at home…

The experience of others giving their lives for us protects us from naivety. What is true love? The one who gives life. Not one that uses others or steals life. If recognized love takes away our energy, it is not God’s. A boy whose performance deteriorates after falling in love and coughs on his friends is proof that love has become a vacuum cleaner of positive energy.

“God likes to reveal himself through natural phenomena, but he himself is above them. That’s why he uses them one time and bypasses them another time.’

The opposite is love with the image of a high jumper. If we normally jump one meter high and suddenly we can jump two meters, people will notice. It shows that doping is allowed. About love that gives wings. These are the people who passed through Jesus as if through the gate to a new life. In this view, the coronavirus pandemic also played something positive in our communities: that which is not of God, which only worked with human forces, ended. That of God remains and has been strengthened through the pandemic.

The Good Shepherd also leads us to think about empty priestly seminaries. What do they want to tell us? Maybe it’s that the frightening example of the priest is mentioned in the families rather than something positive.

When I heard about great priests in several parishes, I asked the young people why they did not follow their example. They admired them, but they did not choose the priesthood. Feeling behind it the immaturity of the children, who remain enthusiastic about the pretty, smart and well-dressed teacher, but do not want to learn. They remained only in admiration.

Spiritual vocations are connected with families. They don’t fall from the sky. Good families will bring quality professions. Weird families generate weirdos in the Reverend. Viennese Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is a rare example of the combination of nobility, wisdom and faith. Czech journalists still had time to interview his mother Eleonora, who died a year ago at the age of 101.

She offered a nice testimony when they did not break even after being expelled from Moravia. Her son became a Dominican priest. And when he was considered a hot candidate for pope in 2005, she prayed he wouldn’t become one, just so she could visit him. And where did she get the strength to cope with life after being expelled from her native land and after the divorce?

I would say that I have a deep faith. And I know that God has taken us into his arms and everything will be according to his will. When a person feels God’s will in himself and follows it, he is happy in the world, even if it is difficult. Sometimes a person asks himself:

Why must I endure this and have such a fate? I never asked that. I told myself that it is so and I will be careful to move on. The main thing is to have confidence that the situation, no matter how bad, has hope that it will change. Seeing things in such a positive way is the main thing in my life.”

In such a climate of love, new professions will also be born.